Cliff Huxtable no more, The Mask of Bill Cosby has Come Off

The Cosby Show is a sitcom that starred Bill Cosby, which aired for eight seasons on NBC from 1984 - 1992. The show focuses on the Huxtable family, an upper middle-class African-American family living in Brooklyn, New York. Because of Cosby's guilty verdict, the Huxtable family will never see the light of day again on Bounce TV, the network that has been running reruns.

Cliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby's character has been said to be the perfect cover for a sexual predator "Cliff is the reason for the cognitive dissonance we’ve been experiencing for the last three or four years. He seemed inseparable from the man who portrayed him." (NY Times)

The criminal trial was for three felony charges of "aggravated indecent assault". He was accused and found guilty of molesting former Temple University basketball staffer, Andrea Constand at his house. In Pennsylvania, there is a 12-year statute of limitation which has caused most of the 60 accusations against Cosby to be too old to be taken to trial. Initially, it had been announced that if he was convicted, he could face up to a 10-year prison sentence for each of the three counts.

After Bill Cosby was convicted, according to multiple news outlets, Cosby yelled, "He doesn't have a plane, you a--!" when the district attorney for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, pushed to have the 80-year-old’s bail revoked, arguing that the entertainer could be a flight risk because he owns a private plane and could travel “any place.”

Cosby was ultimately allowed to remain free on bail but was ordered to stay confined to his home.

“This is the side of Bill Cosby that we know that nobody else believed because I think the general public believes the character that he portrays. They don’t see the real person behind that character,” accuser Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy Playmate who alleged the actor drugged and assaulted her in 1970, told Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb on Today.

At a press conference outside the courthouse, Lili Bernard, who has accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1992, called Constand the “Joan of Arc on the War on Rape.”